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Isabel Wilkerson

By TIME StaffMonday, Apr. 04, 2011

Age: 51
Occupation: Author
Previous TIME 100 appearances: 0

Wilkerson's award-winning book about the African-American migration out of the South from 1915 to 1970, The Warmth of Other Suns, brings into focus the contributions, long ignored, that African Americans made to reshape the U.S. Focusing on the stories of three people, the author, who spent more than a decade researching her work, conducting over 1,200 interviews, compares these refugees from prejudice with the European immigrants of the 19th and 20th centuries. Showing that those who traveled north were well educated and closely tied to families and communities, Wilkerson upends entrenched historical assumptions.